How Indoor Playground Can Greatly Benefit Your Child
Indoor playgrounds are children’s own personal worlds of adventure, catered to kids and kids alone. Unlike most of the normal world, playgrounds are kid-sized and kid-dominated. We all have our own personal memories of exploring the world contained within playgrounds as children, where nothing but the ends of our own imaginations could contain us.
Children love indoor playgrounds because of their seemingly endless new twists and turns. From slides and ball pits to climbing mats and jungle gyms, children’s primary objective on the playground is having fun. What many parents don’t realize is that while their children are having fun, they are also gaining skills and abilities that are essential to their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Here are a few of the documented benefits of regular playtime beyond good, old-fashioned fun.
Five Benefits of Bringing Your Child to an Indoor Playground
•Physical Strength and Health. Childhood obesity is quickly becoming a global health problem. Glued to electronics and consuming unhealthy processed food, far too many children have mostly sedentary lifestyles that involve little physical activity.
•Coordination and Balance. Climbing up slides, hanging off of bars, and running from one piece of equipment to another not only provides children with heart-healthy, muscle-building exercise, but it also improves children’s flexibility and gross motor skills, protecting them from injury during playtime. Children gain confidence in their own bodies when they are able to use them in a constructive way every day.
•Social and Communication Skills. One of the most important parts of indoor playground play are the extensive social benefits. Interacting with children they’ve never met, kids learn how to get along with others, work as a team, share, take turns, and communicate ideas. Playing together on the playground, at school, and at birthday parties helps children to grow into adults who know how to work together and maintain professional relationships despite differences.
•Problem Solving. Social cooperation and individual ingenuity both require children to develop problem-solving skills. Effective problem solving is integral to academic and social success when children start school, and helps children to learn important coping mechanisms that will aid them throughout life.
•Creativity and Imagination. The characters and plots may seem silly to us now, but children’s make-pretend imaginative scenarios are vital to developing critical thinking abilities, an understanding of how the world around them works, and how it might work better. After all, they’ll never understand physics if they don’t understand magic.
